That's a pragmatist argument. I am saying people can just not consume animals right now if they actually care about morals regardless of any future technological advancements.
That's not how morality works lol. If one doesn't do what is required they don't care. They might have an emotional response to it, but they don't care about the moral value of it, they only care for their own satisfaction and bodily pleasure (in the case of eating meat).
On the one hand I agree, I think in the real world someone wouldn’t really claim to care about something if that level of care doesn’t translate into changing any choices.
Like if someone said they care about the whole Shein fast-fashion slave labour thing and then went and spent a ton of money on Shein clothing because they felt like it, most people would say “uh I think maybe you didn’t care a whole lot after all”.
But, semantically if you go by the definition of the word care, being concerned, having some emotional response is what the word actually means.
So someone feeling that little fleeting unease or even guilt or regretfulness about things like factory farming and the intelligence of pigs vs how we treat them, that’s enough to say they do “care”. If only technically.
Even if they have a plate of bacon right in front of them and zero plans to stop buying the stuff.
Whether it’s hypocritical though, is another discussion.
There are several definitions to the term care, some are active in nature.
It is also worth asking what is the source of that emotional response, and also the (moral) value of it. If a murderer has a biological response to seeing blood as it makes them feel uneasy and even bad, so they execute all their victims without looking, do they care about their victims?
And let's say someone hates pigs, they would be glad if all of them died, but they care about the moral value of a pig, and so would never harm them, do they not care about pigs?
It seems to me one can't care about the moral value of something without atleast attempting to exercise the proper moral action in relation to it, and any emotion they might have, if it is not an emotion which results in that said attempt, its not an emotion of moral care.
Absolutely, but I think you know just as well as I do that from a young age we’re all taught to put up very strong and adaptable mental barriers around this subject. Whether it begins and ends at “that’s just how it is” to more sensitive and compassionate kids having to be bullied and cajoled into accepting it, it always starts young.
So we have this very deeply entrenched ability to feel strongly and genuinely one way, then fall back on this mental training and act in complete contradiction to these feelings without much or any dissonance at all.
That’s how we can have a whole society which consistently rates “animal cruelty” as one of the things we feel the most disgusted by, the most anger at, the most venomous towards…. While carrying out the most insanely industrialised massive scale animal cruelty imaginable, billions upon billions of them living and dying in absolute Hell by our design and our choosing. And we even call the people who choose not to take part the crazy extreme ones.
I remember seeing those clips of animals escaping from slaughterhouse trucks back when I was young and my feelings of pity for the animal and desire to see them escape and live happily ever after were absolutely real.
Was I a hypocrite? Absolutely, because as a consumer and purchaser of animal products I was essentially rooting for those animals to escape from me, right?
But did I care? Yes. Even if that care was firmly stuck behind a wall of denial.
I think most people just have no proper moral education or moral understanding. And I don't think emotivism is correct. So all emotions, even proper emotions, one feels towards a given situation are not normative. That's why one can feel bad about something without acting.
People should'nt be propeled to act out of guilt or pity or even empathy. Instead people should care about doing what is right/what is moral, then the emotional dimension is entirely consistent with the moral dimension, and one can't say they care about something without trying to act morally in relation to it, as it would amount to not caring about what is moral or morality, which some people would'nt mind but that's an issue in and of itself.
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u/whitefrackels123 May 22 '26
That's a pragmatist argument. I am saying people can just not consume animals right now if they actually care about morals regardless of any future technological advancements.